He walked down the aisle to his seat just as the overture was getting under way. A girl in an upper box smiled when she caught sight of him and made some comment to an older woman beside her. He imagined she wanted to flirt with him, so he treated her to one of his studied gazes of approval and smiled wickedly out of the corners of his mouth. For a few seconds she returned his look with impudent disdain; then she and the older woman both laughed in his face. The lights went out like a whip and he sat down, wondering what had been the matter with those two.
The curtain went up on a sea of legs — the musical comedy had begun. Five minutes, ten minutes, twelve minutes passed. It progressed well beyond the first half of the first act with still no sign of Lucille. Who was she anyway, Wally wondered. What was she waiting for, what was it all about?
Up on the stage a garden party was in progress. A bevy of girls with parasols and aigrets and lorgnettes and feather fans made shadows play up and down their legs. They stood in battalions and fluttered their fingers from their feet up over their heads. Then all at once he saw her.
She was in the midst of them. The spotlight picked her out. She was like a guinea-pig among peacocks and flamingoes. Her hair was drawn back into a knot at the top of her head, the way they draw them in the comic strips, and there was a ridiculous little hat perched on top, stabbed with a long pin. Her stockings were red and white wool, striped like sticks of peppermint candy. She had on impossible shoes that buttoned half way up her calves — yellow shoes. She had a little old Irish terrier under her arm; it had been trained to try and get away from her and she had to struggle with it to hold it. The people screamed with laughter. The auditorium fairly rocked with it. It dashed itself against the footlights like spray, wave after wave of it. In the balconies people were standing up to get a better view of her.
But Wally Walters never cracked a smile. He sat there staring out at Lucille’s pitiful talcumed face, her clownish face with its blued-in eyes and its blacked lips. The stage beauties circled about her, gorgeous with Titian hair and peach bloom make-up. They studied her through lorgnettes and flicked her with their fans and turned their shoulders on her in contempt. They drew back, leaving her standing alone. Even the little terrier had abandoned her at the first opportunity. There was a hush. A thick shaft of very white light fell on her, powdering her ridiculous padded leg-of-mutton shoulders. She began to sing. She sang about a castle of dreams and how it had come tumbling down. And there was nothing left, she said, nothing; she spread her hands and let them fall sidewise with a slap and sobbed drily deep down in her throat. Then she went shuffling off in her absurd shoes and striped stockings, and on her way out she pretended to trip over something. That brought the entire house down again.
But Wally couldn’t laugh, somehow. He knew how it felt; you bet he knew how it felt. His eyes were stinging him. He pulled his hat from beneath the seat and went trudging up the aisle. People wondered why he was leaving so early. Once he looked back over his shoulder. She hadn’t come out again. They were doing a Charleston to the little tune she had sung so wistfully; they were clodhopping among the ruins of her dream castle. It didn’t matter to him that she was to come back later with a diadem in her hair and paradise tufts on her shoes. He knew how it was when you felt that way. Who would know better than he, always hungering for something out of reach — and not cake either. He stood out in front of the theater, looking aimlessly up the street without seeing anything. He lit a cigaret and tried to pretend that it was the smoke getting in his throat that made it so dry.
He went home to his room — the “budwa” he called it — and lay on the bed, shoes and all. It was a true image of his life, that small room. Disarranged, meaningless, pitiful, choked with trifles, trying hard to be gay but sad at heart. There was a picture of a motion picture actress, Clara Bow, clipped from a magazine and pasted to the wall. There was a tambourine hanging on a nail and a gilt false-face hanging from its elastic on another. There were girls’ telephone numbers scribbled everywhere although the landlady was furious about it. On the dresser there was a ten cent store doll with blue cotton batting for hair; someone had penciled a mustache along its upper lip. There was in addition a nickel-plated pocket flask lying on its side, a feathered bamboo tickler from one of the Chinese restaurants, several menus, a bottle with a little hair grease turned rancid in the bottom of it, and the remains of a package of cigarets. Also a copper ash-tray with chewing gum stuck to it, and one of orange clay with collar buttons and a toothbrush in it.
Somebody was knocking on his door. He bobbed up. “Who is it?” he demanded. He scratched the back of his head.
“You’re wanted on the telefoam,” cried the lady of the house through the panel. He heard her go away again.
He unlocked the door and went down to the foot of the staircase. The receiver was hanging on its cord, so low that it almost touched the floor. He had to stoop to pick it up.
“Yeah?” he said constrainedly.
“Oh, hello!” said a girl’s voice. “This is Connie. Connie speaking.”
“I know,” he remarked dispiritedly, fishing the while through several pockets in the effort to locate a cigaret. When he had found one he held it between his lips without lighting it — a dry smoke — and it bobbed up and down each time he had anything to say.
“I’m up at the Rainbow,” she said. “Why didn’t you show up tonight? Anything wrong?”
“Na,” he said, closing his eyes for a brief moment. He felt he couldn’t stomach Connie this evening, nor any of the others either. The sound of a band, infinitely small and far away and blurred with other noises, came through the receiver.
“Hear that?” said Connie. “Doesn’t it make you itchy?”
“Hm?” he said, not caring much.
“I’ll keep my eye open for you,” she went on. “How long will it take you to get here, cake?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not coming. No, not for tonight. I’m all fagged out.”
“Why, what’s gotten into you all of a sudden?” she demanded in surprise. “Are you trying to kid me? You know yourself you couldn’t keep away from here even if you wanted to.”
“That’s what you say.”
He shut his eyes and pressed his forehead against the wall.
“They’re going to have a Charleston contest and everything,” Connie was saying. “I entered your name for you. You better see that you get here. The leading lady from ‘Lucille’ is coming up after the show to award the prizes—”
“Hell she is!” he burst out.
“What’s the matter,” protested Connie angrily, “are you trying to crack my eardrum?”
“Wait for me,” he cried. “I’ll be over in a jiffy. Meet you in the foyer—” and hung up.
“Men sure are changeable,” sighed Carfare Connie, powdering her nose with a puff the size of a postage stamp.
Meanwhile in Wally’s room a toilette was in full swing. He crowded his number eight feet into number seven dancing shoes, with spats to cap the climax; he soaked his hair with glycerin — oh, there’s no use denying Wally tossed a mean toilette once he got going. And as he went out, carelessly banging the door shut after him, the draft brought the movie star’s picture fluttering down from the wall.
There was a taxi standing in front of the Rainbow with its engine going, waiting for someone. It was unusual for a taxi to be here at that hour. Most patrons of the place arrived on foot, or if they rode at all it was in trolley cars and the front seats of moving vans. Wally knew who had hired it without being told. He bought his ticket of admission at the box office and went in. At the inner door he was frisked for possible concealed liquor and brushed by them impatiently. He checked his coat and hat and bought twenty-five cents’ worth of blue dance tickets at a nickel a dance. The lights were all swathed in yellow and orange gauze, and from each corner of the gallery a colored lens was directed against the dancers below. Connie was sitting waiting for him at a tiny table which held her elbows, an imitation rhinestone purse, a limeade with two straws, and a zigzag of undetached blue tickets. She waved and he went over to her.